News releases

This 2018 Winter semester, CIRM’s Professor of Practice of the McConnell Foundation, Gorka Espiau, will be teaching a seminar – URBP 542 New Social Innovation Dynamics – at the School of Urban Planning of McGill University.

The one credit seminar will be held January 16th, 18th, 22nd and 23rd 2018, from 6:05 to 8:55 p.m.:

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that musical training helps people hear speech syllables in loud environments, and has shown how this happens. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers Yi Du and Robert Zatorre monitored brain function as musicians and non-musicians listened to speech fragments and varying background noise levels.

A clinical trial almost ten years in the making has revealed that risky, but powerful, clot busting drugs and medical devices do not improve outcomes for patients experiencing deep vein thrombosis (DVT), nor do they prevent the development of post-thrombotic syndrome (PTS) when compared with conventional blood thinning medications. The results of the Acute Venous Thrombosis: Thrombus Removal with Adjunctive Catheter-Directed Thrombolysis (ATTRACT) study are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

For the past ten years, the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors at McGill University and the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) in Washington, D.C. have come together for the annual Holiday Lottery Campaign, a corporate social responsibility program designed to help lotteries make adults aware of the risks of giving lottery products as holiday gifts to minors.

Industry and academia team up for the benefit of people suffering from ALS

A unique industry-academia partnership will increase the rate at which promising drug compounds can be tested as potential treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease with no known cure that affects 200,000 people worldwide.

The partnership between The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (MNI) and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (Takeda) will allow compounds developed by Takeda scientists to be tested on cell lines produced at the MNI.

Fatty liver is among the most frequent causes of liver disease in Canada and in Western countries and is one of the main indications for liver transplant. For some time, researchers have suspected that people living with HIV could be at higher risk of developing liver disease, which, as a result of longer life expectancy thanks to antiretroviral therapy, has become the major cause of their mortality in North America.

To celebrate Montreal’s 375th anniversary, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal wanted to examine the mechanisms and processes that have made it possible, in the history of the city, to maintain a relative social peace. The CIRM is now proud to present its first publication (in French), Vivre ensemble à Montréal. Épreuves et convivialités.

Professor Palmer is one of the few researchers to receive two CREATE training grants to date. From 2009-2015, Professor Palmer led an NSERC funded CREATE program in auditory cognitive neuroscience, training over 180 students and postdoctoral fellows. Her significant findings from that program informed her training program application in Complex Dynamics.

New research by McGill University biologists shows that milder winters have led to physical alterations in two species of mice in southern Quebec in the past 50 years – providing a textbook example of the consequences of climate change for small mammals.

The findings also reveal a stark reversal in the proportions of the two mice populations present in the area, adding to evidence that warming temperatures are driving wildlife north.

Can mindfulness training help overweight people shed pounds and keep them off? McGill University researchers surveyed the growing body of studies investigating that question, and came away encouraged.

Kimberly Carrière, Bärbel Knäuper and Bassam Khoury examined 19 studies conducted over the past decade. Mindfulness interventions in these studies involved either formal meditation, informal mindfulness strategies that focused on eating activity, or some combination of these two approaches.

Do songbirds and humans have common biological hardwiring that shapes how they produce and perceive sounds?

Scientists who study birdsong have been intrigued for some time by the possibility that human speech and music may be rooted in biological processes shared across a variety of animals. Now, research by McGill University biologists provides new evidence to support this idea.